Desegregate Yourself

562: The Problem We All Live With

JUL 31, 2015

The most interesting thing that happened to me this week was listening to This American Life podcast about desegregation.

link to podcast, episode 562 "The Problem We All Live With"

In the podcast, a journalist tells about watching the media coverage of the Michael Brown shooting and the following Ferguson riots, but this journalist noticed a detail that was missed by most other reporters.  This journalist saw the video footage of Michael Brown's mother approaching the body of her son, as he lay in the street.  When the mother saw her son's body, her first anguished words were caught on camera, and they weren't what the journalist was expecting.    



I witnessed this "Problem We All Live With" when living in the Bronx.  I taught a youth Sunday school class.  One time, as part of some Bible lesson, I asked all of my students - kids from the SouthBronx -  to write down one wish.

Andre D., age 14.  As if he didn't want his words to speak too loudly, he wrote his wish all scrunched up in the top margin of a full piece of lined paper.  He wished for a schoolteacher that would teach something instead of sitting behind his/her desk and waiting for the bell to ring.

I would recommend another compelling glimpse of the effects of segregation... "Promises," a documentary that follows 7 children growing up in the Arab/Palestinian conflict zone.

Documentary about Palestinian/Israeli conflict

One of the NPR reports about the 1-year anniversary of the Ferguson riots concluded by asking the question, "what can we do?"  The answer on the radio was that all other solutions were unsustainable or ineffective, so "look around your neighborhood, and if it's not diverse, then move."

Segregation is the problem we all live with.

I'm thankful that it's been possible for Mike and for me to desegregate ourselves to some small extent. We desegregated ourselves by moving to the Bronx instead of staying in our home state for graduate school, joining the military, choosing to move to Europe and to NZ when the opportunities presented themselves.

We've also chosen to desegregate ourselves without moving.  I helped a young woman do her Laurel project by visiting all the other churches in town and went out of my way to find hispanic students to add to my all-white piano studio.  We recently found ourselves eating with our fingers at the home of Meera, a Sri Lankan colleague and neighbor.

The world is a big place, though, and there are still many people and places of which I have little understanding.

Here are some things that I think can help us all...

• read widely
• travel
• study abroad
• serve missions
• join the military
• visit other churches beside your own
• adopt,  be a foster parent, accept an exchange student
• volunteer in your larger community
• make a point to nurture friendships from outside your ethnic group/religious group/age group
• ask questions